Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday June 27, 2010 @12:08PM
from the if-you-build-it dept.

An anonymous reader tips news that ICANN has officially approved the creation of a .xxx suffix for porn sites, confirming the rumors we discussed on Thursday. While this resolves a 10-year debate on the subject, the Guardian notes that "many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org." Others are more confident, like Stuart Lawley of ICM Registry, the company sponsoring the new TLD. "Mr. Lawley said more than 100,000 domains had preregistered. He said he expected that when the dot-xxx domains opened for business, nine to 12 months from now, some 500,000 domains would register, or roughly 10% of the five million to six million adult online sites."

DNS is just a big extortion racket... I can imagine that Google will make sure to register google.xxx, gmail.xxx, youtube.xxx, etc. just like Facebook and any other big site. Celebrities are probably being advised to register their names (e.g. sandrabullock.xxx). It's the same as with the.net and.org domains defensive registering but much worse.

I'm sure that 90% of those preregistrations are by domain name squatters.

Of course they are, which is to be expected since this whole exercise is nothing more than registrars grabbing at cash.

The sad part is all the uninformed idiots posting here who support the idea -- if even a fair number of Slashdot posters still don't understand why this is such a horrible idea then it's no wonder ICANN caved. On the one hand, they look good to the morons who have been pushing for this stupid idea for years, and on the other they were probably bribed with a huge amount money. Win win!

For those wondering why.xxx is a terrible idea that is completely doomed to fail (at all the "official" goals at least, it will certainly succeed as the gravy train it's designed to be), read RFC 3675:.sex Considered Dangerous [rfc-editor.org]. It has all the same arguments being presented here, plus more.

Domain squatting is a completely separate issue. And one that has been solved in many countries —where I live it's outright illegal to domain squat, and protected using the same laws/infrastructure as trademarks.

You can buy any domain you want here, but if someone else has a trademark — or if they're simply better known than you — then they can take it off you at any time. It's also illegal for anyone except officially approved registrars to sell a domain name, so taking control of a domai

After this they'll do the custom TLDs, then do away with the whole thing and eventually they'll sell us the domains we really wanted in the first place. Why let people pay once when they'll be happy to pay three or four times.

All this will do is rake in registration $$$ and have zero effect on anything else. Take any site for example, like youporn.com. They will go register youporn.xxx so they have their name protected, and one will redirect to the other. If some other company tried to register youporn.xxx out from under them, the real site would just sue and claim it.

There will be real effects. Consider - in the US we have had recent obscenity convictions against some porn producers seen as turning out content especially degrading to women (slapping, punching, spitting in faces, and faux rape.). We haven't had anything in well over a decade focused on non-violent porn, targeting gay porn selectively has apparently died out even in the south, and even such things as bondage and fisting videos get a pass, (but many of them are careful to have spoken discliamers from the submissives involved and various "no sluts were harmed in the making of this video" claims included to protect themselves). Scat probably would draw legal action, but the mainstream producers haven't tried that. The industry has been vocally extremely divided over violence for the last few years.
I'd just about bet real money that some porn producers will use.xxx to prove they are being responsible corporations and trying to keep their material out of the hands of minors, because that would be another way to protect themselves from prosecution, and they seem to be willing to go to some trouble over creating an image that they are not one of 'those' porn businesses, but rather one of the 'other' ones. Some will see it as a financial hit to move content exclusively to.xxx domains, but others will see it as another way to avoid being the rare porn producer singled out.
The bigest force actually working against this is the evangelical right, which usually sees no difference between a Girls Gone Wild video and Underaged Wet Mule Sodomizers part 83. If they focused their complaints on the companies that produce the kinkiest stuff, they'd get a lot more results from various justice departments, but then they would have to admit that some porn producers really do care if all the 'models' are over 18, really do show safe sex practices, or avoid violent sex, so don't hold your breath.

Not necessarily, it really depends on what they're giving for that $60. If it's just a registration without any extras, then yes it is. However some TLDs are more exclusive than others, while pretty much anybody can get a.com,.net or.org domain name, it's tough to get a.gov or.edu without jumping through a number of hoops.

For the.xxx TLD, it could ultimately be a bargain if it allows for porn sites to demonstrate that they aren't just using random shots which haven't been vetted to be legal or that

The whole point was to put them in the same place to make filtering easier. Eventually, it will happen, by themselves or forced by legislation. (Think of the children:-) )
It really only makes sense. If all porn was there, the people that want it can find it easily and the ones that want to filter it, can do so very easily. I can't understand the so called "controversy". The whole issue seems pretty silly.

It really only makes sense. If all porn was there, the people that want it can find it easily

Great firewall of Australia ring a bell? Their filtering list would be a heck of a lot easier to maintain if they just had to do "*.xxx" for the sex stuff. In fact, having a separate domain for anything makes it easier for any point in the chain to slap a filter in. Maybe your ISP decides it should protect minors. Something. All kinds of options for underhanded things to happen if you separate out parts of the 'net in such an obvious fashion.

The company sponsoring the dot-xxx domain, the ICM Registry, said it had a vision of a red-light district in cyberspace that was a clean, well-lighted place, free of spam, viruses and credit card thieves.

... is totally unbelievable. It will be just another hub for spam, viruses, and credit card thieves.

It is only in the US that xxx is equivalent to porn. In other languages, xxx means crossed over or censored. So why the fuck is the new tld called "xxx" when the porn link is only obvious to Americans? Isn't ICANN supposted to care about the whole world and not just the US? If they wanted a porn tld, they could have called it ".porn," ".adult" or even ".sex" both which would have been more logical than ".xxx" Is it because the word "porn" is so dirty you have to call it "xxx" instead and pretend it is something else?

Nope, xxx is actually recognised in a lot of countries. I have never heard of it meaning crossed/censored before.I just asked people from Germany, England, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden (IRC ftw) and they all knew what it meant.

Surely, you must have seen it used in phone numbers, for example 070/XX XXX XXX. Sure they know what it means because they jack off a lot and know everything about American culture. Use google.de or google.nl and search for the most common meanings of xxx in those languages. In Seden, there are companies called XXX Architects and Design XXX. Neither of them have anything to do with porn. Instead the XXX is used to mean "extra extra extra." Probably they think they are really good at what they do.

Heh.....it will mean that soon. And not just in English: all over the internet using world, in any country with a reasonable size user base, no matter what language they speak, xxx will come to mean porn. So enjoy.

Incidentally, xxx comes from our movie rating system, where xxx is the most obscene type of porn.

Incidently, no. "xxx" comes from old wordfilters on school nets, where blacklisted words were replaced by x's instead. Guess what sex got replaced with? Yup, "xxx".

No, GPP is right. "XXX" far predates the widespread use of networking in schools, and comes from the movie industry. The story goes something like this: when the MPAA created its film rating system in the 1960s, they copyrighted all the ratings but X. So if you said you were making a G-rated or R-rated movie, say, you had to get the MPAA to sign off on it, but you could rate your movie X without any approval. If you submitted a porn movie (or occasionally a very violent movie) to the MPAA, they'd oblig

See this explanation [straightdope.com]. phantomfive (GP) was almost correct, except that the movie rating system didn't have any rating more obscene than "X", porn movie advertisers/marketers invented the "XXX" as even more shocking than "X". And because of the "misuse" of X, the MPAA has moved to calling it "NC-17" [wikipedia.org] which is hard to twist into a marketing advantage.

Actually, quite a few languages use "xxx" as a placeholder for "adult", "porn" and the likes. I have seen it used as such in practically every country I've ever been to.

Words like "adult", "porn", and -- to a lesser extend -- "sex" are English words that have no meaning in other languages. "xxx" is pretty universal in that it isn't actually a real word that would need translation.

"It is only in the US that xxx is equivalent to porn. In other languages, xxx means crossed over or censored"

so in countries besides the usa sexuality isn't the biggest target for censorship?

and i said "in countries besides the usa" not "my own special subset of liberal european countries i use to ridicule the usa's policies, rather than the full set of countries in the world, revealing that the usa is actually moderate or left of center on most issues, and even more left leaning on some free speech issues

Be patient, in 10 years.porn,.adult and.sex will be available as well. This will help to eliminate any confusion. TLDs are getting better all the time. What would we do without.mobi,.name,.museum,.biz,.coop,.info,.int,.jobs,.pro,.tel, and.travel?

TLDs are bullshit. Just search slashdot.com or slashdot.net if you don't believe me.

They've been trying to get a.xxx domain for a long time, but I couldn't figure out why. The porn industry opposes it, the people who oppose the porn industry oppose it, and tech people generally oppose it. Took me a while to realize it was only some registrars who wanted some extra cash who kept bringing it up.

My question is, why did ICANN finally relent? Were they bribed? Did they just become impatient over the issue that they've said 'no' to for over a decade? Is it possible to get anything passed through ICANN if you just ask enough times? Why is ICANN supporting this blatant rent-seeking?

It's not a question of why they finally relented so much as what took so long. There's no inherent reason why this should've taken so long. The reasoning was that the conservatives don't want any porn anywhere, and the porn industry was concerned about being relegated to a ghetto TLD.

But, ultimately, this is probably a good thing, since.com wasn't ever really very well monitored with respect to child porn and criminal activity. One of the promises that ICM has made is that there will be no child porn on

It's not a question of why they finally relented so much as what took so long. There's no inherent reason why this should've taken so long. The reasoning was that the conservatives don't want any porn anywhere, and the porn industry was concerned about being relegated to a ghetto TLD.

The question likely depends on whether you think this is a good idea or not. ICANN has looked at the issue several times in the past decade and denied it. That didn't take long. It is the relentless pursuit (ICANN notes that Lawley claims an over US$5 mil bill [internetgovernance.org] for this pursuit) that took so long.

More importantly (at least according to Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]) is that ICANN approved Chinese internationalized domain names in this same update notification. What's the big deal with the XXX domain? Okay so now I know that the porn site I'm going to is actually a porn site... big deal. Ain't going to help filters all that much anyway unless it's required which would be really stupid and shortsighted. I think the changes for a billion Chinese speakers is bigger news.

I think the concept behind the.xxx domain has the potential of leading the internet down a dangerous path. If the other TLD's are forced by their governing entity, e.g. the US government for the.com TLD, to prohibit pornographic content, the precedent will be set to segregate and regulate content.

I have to admit to mixed feelings about this. There's an obvious danger of censorship, and I don't want to see anything on the internet, porn or anything else, pushed into a walled garden. But I'm old enough to remember when.org and.net actually meant something, and I'd actually like to see much stricter standards applied to who can register for those. The precedent is already set; it just hasn't been followed for years. It's a dilemma.

Register yourname.xxx as your personal homepage, and give it out to all of your friends and coworkers! When they ask, "Umm, is this...", respond with, "You'll just have to go find out, now won't you?", and follow with a wink and a wry smile.
Of course, you always could, you know, if you wanted...

i'm not talking about the religious nuts, i understand their point of view: they think a.xxx domain makes porn legitimate. as if not having a.xxx domain means POOF, all porn disappears. porn is a part of society, and some can argue it actually serves a valid purpose (harmless release of sexual frustrations). get used to it, (hypocritical) social conservatives, you have a better chance fighting the rising and falling of the tides. its not going away, ever

but i'm talking about the porn purveyors: why are they fighting this? it's not a ghettoization, its a domain. yes, it makes it easy to censor sexual content. and what's wrong with that? if i have some kids in my house, and i want to black hole all.xxx domains, i should be able to do that. if a nation wants to blackhole all.xxx domains at a national level meanwhile: ok, this nation is retarded. as if not having.xxx means they won't engage in idiotic censorship? you make it easier for them? do you see iran and china quaking in their boots because censorship is hard? get real: a committed censoring asshole is a committed censoring asshole, the issue of easy or hard to censor is an issue for people who want to block the domain for legitimate purposes (kids in the house), not an issue for those who will censor no matter what

and finally, there's the red herring of sexual content that shouldn't be grouped with porn, like sexual health. well if its sexual health, like how to put on a condom, its sexual health, end of discussion. its not pornography. yes, some assholes will try to group sexual health issues with porn. the existence of such assholes does not mean sexual health issues deserve to be with porn, just that there exists assholes in this world with harmful ideas about sexual health that you need to fight, and the existence or lack of existence of an.xxx domain does not change their existence or the need to fight them. in fact, let them make fools of themselves by trying to group sexual health topics with porn, and reveal to the thinking rational world what ignorant assholes they really are, bring their idiocy to the forefront

the REAL point is that pornography is not some GOTCHA that tries to sneak up on innocent teenagers and corrupt their souls, this is social conservative bullshit (and fails to understand human nature). clearly defining and delineating pornographic content simply underlines the most important point here: pornography is something that people choose to consume, and if some hypocritical social conservative asshole doesn't like that fact, or is ashamed of that fact, then don't click on an.xxx domain, end of story!

because no one is trying to trick you into recognizing that you have sexual urges

fly the new.xxx flag loud and proud. its simply a healthy recognition of the fact that we are sexual beings, and we are happy and comfortable making a space for this material on our internet. LACK OF recognition of the validity of porn is the REAL problem, lack of an.xxx domain is an act of misplaced shame, and that's the real motivation behind ignoring the issue, and denying porn its own domain

giving porn its own domain is sex positive, and good for society. really. every rational, self-aware human should celebrate this

-It is stupid to expect all porn to go to ".xxx".
-Therefore it doesn't make it easier to filter porn, it means your filters have to have one extra line for "block *.xxx". Technically, it is a little more work to block porn now than it was before.
-Who defines porn, anyway? What is it, exactly?
-The only reason it exists is to print money, and everyone is jealous that they can't do that

It's not about pornographers hiding themselves. Actually many pornographers will set up an.xxx domain as alternative to their existing.com domain. What they will not do is to give up their existing.com domain, which their customers know, which are likely linked from somewhere, and which are not so easy to filter.

How does having a.xxx domain suffix make it easier to find the site?.xxx doesn't give the site special powers. Does having.org as the domain suffix make it easier for a charity to be found? Does.edu make it easier for a school to be found? Obviously, no. Either way you have to know the whole domain name, not just the suffix, and type it in your address bar or have it indexed by a search engine or something else. I'm just not buying that there is any economic incentive to the porn industry for havin

That's exactly why.xxx is a bad idea. New sites don't have anything to lose but existing ones rely on customers knowing their domain name. The domain name is part of their brand and abandoning the existing name in favor of a.xxx one would be the equivalent of hiding from their customers.

this is an age old logical fallacy i'm sick of: "because grey areas exist, we can't say black isn't white"

porn exists, and is real. because there are grey areas doesn't mean we can't characterize something as porn

an analogy: abortion

at some point, its a just blob a woman is purging. at another point it is a human being you are murdering. ignoring for the moment the existence of the complete idiots who believe that when a sperm meets an egg you have a human lif

this is an age old logical fallacy i'm sick of: "because grey areas exist, we can't say black isn't white"

Likewise, we can't say that "because there is black and white, we can't say something is grey." And, no matter how you slice it, a top-level domain is black and white. You can't have a web address that's 46%.com and 54%.xxx; you have to call it one way or the other. The problem is, no two groups will call all web sites the same. I might consider a site on preventing the spread of STDs to be non-porn,

The porn purveyors will have to keep their.com domains anyway to get around people filtering.xxx and because everyone already knows about their.com domain. Because of this, the.xxx is simply redundant.

the trouble is the "Loonies" Tm Max Msley will be trying to force all content they considder imoral onto the xxx domain - the trouble wil come when they try to force Murdoch to move the Sun's website as it has topless photos in it.

As you admit the only use of the xxx domain is for censorship (for the children of course). If "we are sexual beings" why does porn only get one domain? How about instead a.kid domain for the sexually undeveloped?

Lawley says he expects to make $30m (£20m) a year in revenue by selling each.xxx site for $60, and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives.

If he actually gives $6 million per year to child protection causes the universe will implode out of shock and amazement.

Also on children, are they supposing children will never stumble into a.xxx domain (or that.xxx can be blocked altogether), so now they're safe from porn? Because I'm sure that.xxx porn sites will never use pop-up loops or deceptive ads or auto-dialing trojans the way many.com porn sites have done forever. The new.xxx porn industry will be squeaky clean, with our children's welfare at heart!

Not to mention the whole thing won't have any damn effect unless you simultaneously force current.com,.net, and.org porn sites to re-register in.xxx and drop their old domains, which will not happen.

Furthermore, for the whole notion of giving adults an easy, consolidated place to access porn, let me give ICANN a big hint: whether it's porn, cracks, bomb making instructions, or whatever, the most obvious place to look for anything even vaguely taboo is always the one most flooded with scams, viruses, top lists, etc. which make the obvious places by far the most worthless places to look. I predict that absolutely all worthwhile porn will remain on.com sites for quite some time, and that.com sites will simply register the same domain registered under.xxx and redirect people back into the.com site.

"Each domain registration will cost $60 a year, with $10 going to a nonprofit organization promoting “responsible business practices” for the industry." Beside this being overly expensive for a domain name the fact that they donate $10 per domain to a nonprofit organisation is just wrong. Who are they to decide for us that this should be done? Aren't they supposed to be some sort of objective organisation when it comes to this?

the fact that they donate $10 per domain to a nonprofit organisation is just wrong...Who are they to decide for us that this should be done?

They're not deciding anything "for us". They're making a public decision to donate some of their profit, purely private money, to a certain cause. You make it sound like they're breaking into your house, stealing your piggy bank, and sending it to UNICEF. If you don't agree with mandatory "donations" to charities (eg: your employer appointing a designated United Way coordinator who literally harasses you at work to donate money) I hear you and agree with you, but that is not what's happening here.

Nobody is going to type in a random character string and add.xxx to try to find porn. The idea that ".xxx" will make it easier to find porn is a fallacy. It will still need to be indexed and linked to just like current sites.

Actually, I think it'd be a lot more useful to create a.kids domain and give people the walled garden they want.
Heck, I wouldn't be opposed to having a.christ domain either, that way I can filter it out through my firewall and never have to worry about accidentally stumbling upon it!

I'm not authoritative here, but I don't think walled gardens have done society much good where they've been tried. They certainly don't look very successful in China, North Korea, Utah, or anywhere else they've been seriously attempted.

I couldn't tell, really, if you approved of the whole idea, were joking about your Jesus-free garden, or anything, but I thought it was worth making a serious reply in any case. Shutting yourself off rarely helps.

businesses that wanted to prevent their names from being hijacked. Mr. Lawley said businesses could ensure that their names were not misused in the dot-xxx world by paying a one-time fee, to be set from $50 to $250.

Sounds like trying to extort money from honest businesses. Forcing Amazon to spend money for Amazon.xxx

The whole thing is about ICANN making more money, nothing else whatsoever. ICANN is a means to extort money from legitimate businesses and organizations who wish to protect their image. Each new TLD ensures that, and generates more revenue. Since the Registrars control ICANN more or less, its just a cartel making more money for its members.

How the funk can it take 10 years to approve a new TLD? Was ICANN under the impression that if it approved it, the world would be flooded with pr0n, as if it's not flooded already and has been since pretty much the inception of the net as we know it? Only in America are organisations able to take themselves so incredibly seriously and be so incredibly prudish about it. Apple's another one: no nipples in the AppStore boys! Steve Jobs says they make you go blind (or is it just very thin?)

The porn sites don't want it, the anti-porn sites don't want it. Is not usefull for the purpose of a root domain. It will only serve to suck money from some sites that will register yet another domain and not use it.

Sure it can, if the registrar makes good on its pledge to ban child porn from the TLD, that would likely be a significant draw to porn sites. Especially ones that are asking for people to pay. With $60 a year in registration fees, it's not going to make much difference off the bottom line of a decent site, but being able to say that you're free of unadvertised impropriety can easily add up to big sales. People that frequent those sites are often times concerned about things like kiddie pr0n and becoming a victim of ID theft. If the registrar manages to crack down on that more than the.com registrars do, then it's likely going to make much larger sums of money.